Video
Wire Fraud? What To Do In The First 24 to 72 Hours
If a fraudulent wire transfer was sent, time is critical. The first 24 to 72 hours may determine whether the funds can be recovered. In this episode, New York attorney Max Dilendorf explains what to do immediately after discovering wire fraud.
Dilendorf Law Firm, New York 716 words, transcribed
If a fraudulent wire transfer was sent, time is critical. The first 24 to 72 hours may determine whether the funds can be recovered.
In this episode, New York attorney Max Dilendorf explains what to do immediately after discovering wire fraud.
He covers reporting the fraud to your bank, preserving evidence, filing an IC3 complaint, and avoiding mistakes that can hurt recovery efforts.
Dilendorf Law Firm also assists victims with the FBI’s Rapid Response Process and FinCEN’s Financial Fraud Kill Chain program.
These tools can help financial institutions trace, freeze, or recall funds before they disappear through additional accounts.
If you are dealing with wire fraud, account takeover, or business email compromise, act quickly. Every hour matters.
Full transcript
0:10 If your funds were stolen through wire fraud, or you sent a wire based on fraudulent instructions, what you do in the next 24 to 72 hours will determine if the funds could be ever be recovered. Nothing in this video is legal advice. If you need immediate assistance, reach out to my law firm. First, you have to notify your bank immediately, both by phone and in writing. Request a wire recall or reversal, and ask the bank to issue a Hold Harmless Letter or Letter of Indemnity. We assist clients with that.
0:44 What you tell the bank matters whether you were the victim of an account takeover, business email compromise, or a device breach could affect not only recovery, but potential claims against the bank itself.
0:56 A poorly documented report creates problems later.
0:59 Second, file a complaint with the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center, or IC3. The sooner you report the incident, the greater the chance a federal enforcement agency picks up your case.
1:12 I'm Max Dilendorf, a New York attorney. I've focused on digital asset law since 2017, and over the years I've arbitrated and investigated hundreds of cyber-theft, financial fraud, and asset recovery cases. I work directly with retired federal law enforcement investigators and expert witnesses who spent their careers on cybercrime wire fraud and crypto theft, which in the age of AI increasingly go hand in hand.
1:44 Stablecoins and the rise of neobanks have blurred the line between the two, so the money often moves seamlessly from a bank account into crypto and back.
1:56 When a fraudulent wire transfer or crypto theft occurs, we bring them in immediately to evaluate the facts, preserve evidence, coordinate with financial institutions, and determine whether federal seizure, forfeiture, or remission options are available.
2:15 The scale of cybercrime in the US is staggering. According to the FBI's 2025 IC3 report, business email compromise losses alone exceeded $3 billion in a single year. And that's just one category.
2:31 The attacks have also grown incredibly sophisticated.
2:35 The old advice watch for bad grammar, a strange domain, a sense of urgency assumed a human on the other end with limited time and information. That no longer holds.
2:50 Today, what sends these messages has read the entire email thread.
2:56 It knows the deal, the amounts, the way each person writes, and it delivers the payment instructions at the exact moment when they re expected.
3:08 Nothing appears wrong. Only the account number is off.
3:12 And it is no longer only email. The phone rings, and the caller ID says it's your bank's fraud department. The person already knows your recent transactions and account details. They are calling to "help you stop a fraudulent transfer" and they walk you into authorizing the real one. The voice may be cloned.
3:32 The number may be spoofed to match the one on the back of your card.
3:36 If this happened to you, you were not careless. You were targeted by something built to be invisible. And I know how that sounds so don't take it from me. In June of 2026, the NSA and its Five Eyes partners issued a joint statement: frontier AI models are anticipated to exceed current industry expectations, fundamentally transforming both offensive and defensive cyber capabilities.
4:04 The timeline, they said, is not years it is months.
4:07 But most people don't lose their money to the attack itself. They lose it to what happens next the hours spent waiting instead of acting.
4:16 The victim calls their bank or financial institution. The bank says it needs time to investigate and will follow up. A day passes. Then another.
4:25 In the meantime, the recall window closes while everyone is being polite.
4:31 By the time the matter is escalated, the mule account has been emptied and the funds moved into crypto and this is where speed and the right forensic team decide whether anything can still be traced and frozen. Clients engage us to prevent exactly that.
4:46 We handle the federal reporting and escalation, coordinate with the institutions involved, and pursue the liability question in parallel whether the bank was negligent, whether it followed its own verification procedures, and what consumer-protection remedies could apply.
5:03 That is a separate fight from recovery, and it begins with evidence secured on day one.
5:08 If this happened to you, reach out for a confidential consultation.
A transcript of the recording, so it reads as speech rather than as prose. It explains the law in general terms and is not advice on your own situation, which turns on facts this video cannot know.
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